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Jolly Swagman’s Platonically Ideal Cheddar

“But they investigate themselves, and it turns out they’re not guilty”

B R

B R

— 3 min read

7 April, 2023 | Sydney Australia

Waking up to some pouring rain, I nixed the plans to hit up the beaches and decided to catch up on more writing and move over to the other place I had rented.

After finding Infinity Bakery and gorging myself on too much coffee and too many pastries - it had been a while since I had found a good go-to breakfast place - I walked north to King’s Cross.

I stopped by a grocery store for various sundries, and also as an excuse to rubberneck at a foreign grocery store for some weird or usual stuff. Australia does not disappoint here

No, I didn’t ask.
I am now convinced this is what Plato meant by ideal forms

King’s Cross used to be the seediest part of the city; rife with poverty, people camping in alleys, and enormous drunken crowds that occasionally turned violent. I observed plenty of the former two but the latter had been somewhat impacted by a crackdown after the death of a reveler (and COVID of course). The crackdown involved not doing too much drastically to limit operating hours, but rather preventing new patrons from entering a bar after 1:30am - you could still stay well into 3:00am. I guess this worked? Honestly they really should just consider legalizing cannabis. The number of people who get violent due to its influence is limited exclusively to campy 1950s era propaganda.

What was most notable as I wandered through King’s Cross was the sheer number of backpacker hostels with increasingly silly names like “Mad Monkey” and “Hump”.

Courtesy of Google Maps. They had a warning that “This image might be subject to copyright” but that absolutely didn’t stop them from reposting it, so where we are.

King’s Cross is yet another part of yet another city that is vastly improved by cars mostly being relegated to second class citizens as urban design goes. To an outside observer I must look very strange while walking through these areas - there’s a big smile on my face until my thoughts creep back to the fact Seattle can’t even pedestrianized Pike Place Market for fucks sake.

In a future where the city government is not a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce and Police Union, Seattle too could have innumerable water features in large open squares lined with cafes, bars, and even daily open air markets with independent sellers in a union (like Santiago, Tokyo, etc).

The place I rented was in a hotel-apartment - which is either a real thing in other countries - the place in Auckland was one of these as well - or just an illegal hotel, driving up housing prices for the entire city. I genuinely don’t know, because they had the trappings of an apartment as far as appliances (washer/dryer combo etc) but the Auckland place had a literal hotel lobby and called itself a hotel and I picked up my keys from a hotel at King’s Cross.

Did I make their housing crisis worse? Is there even an individual way to not do that?

I am actually not wealthy, so there wasn’t a situation where I was going to be doing all this trip with hotels, but I was hoping to stick more to stuff like “a single room from a local who lives there” stuff like with Robert. I would have just continued with him, but the timing wouldn’t work for how long I was in Sydney.

In our last conversation, after talking politics and travel, we traded music. I’ll leave you with first, what he shared with me after I said I was going to Ireland.

Fields of Athenry describes a Irish dissident being separated from his family, imprisoned, and shipped off to Australia. Robert recounted listening to it in a pub and seeing much of the audience weeping, a testament to the strong feelings still associated with that diaspora.

I shared with him Daloy Polizei by Geoff Berner. I’ll let the lyrics speak for themselves, but there is almost no better live musical experience than watching people of all ages  singing the end of the refrain.

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